IT'S BETTER THAN DRINKIN' ALONE: The Official ILM Track-by-Track BILLY JOEL Listening Thread

Casino, you evidently haven't heard my karaoke version of "She's 'So Cold."

I love the Chris Kimsey-engineered self-produced Stones mall rat era (I'm not a "Start Me Up" fan).

As a kid, I learned what the Combat Zone and Bed-Stuy were from this song.

This one to my ears fits "[song / album] basically invented [band / genre]" -- this is the ur-text for Quebec bar-band rock.

Billy Joel, New Wave--I fail to see the problem.

catching up!:

"zanzibar": i think this is my favorite billy joel song???? which is mostly bc it's billy simulating a steely dan song and doing it extremely well????

"stiletto": i love this song even though billy's vocal on it is fucking bizarre. such a sharp, excitable arrangement, the bridge especially. feel like a lot of his best songs are generated from this kind of irascible excitability which i feel is embodied in the live clip of "zanzibar" where he runs across the stage just to play a solo on a hammond organ

"rosalinda's eyes": the opening groove is so lush and centerless and but it gets mushy and undistinguished from there. like many of dude's deep cuts it feels like a draft for a better song he never ended up writing. the all-percussion coda is a nice touch

"half a mile away": hell YEAH. horns! buy a cheap wai-yine!!! i guess this song could revolve around a stronger hook but it nails the philly soul vibe so well that i don't mind "wordless flights into falsetto standing in for the hook." i feel tremendous unearned affection for this song lol

"until the night": wtf is up with billy's voice. stop it, my dude. six minutes of posturing that doesn't actually assemble into a song. why is this song so long, why won't it stop. i'm glad he starts singing normally in the fourteenth verse or whatever and the sax solo is incredible but i'm so tired and here comes that underwritten chorus again, thankfully it is the year 2177 and i am a skeleton whose ears have been reduced to mute unresonating bones

"52nd street": yeah some more of those collapsing steely dan-esque chords billy! no not more of your ray charles imitation wtf!!!

"you may be right" is a fuckin jam ofc though i remember the guitar riff in the chorus being more muscular than it actually is. any punk covers of this shit

i'm surprised that after the relatively self-assured the stranger that so much of the second side of 52nd street is devoted to identity crisis but about half of those songs are great anyway

it's hard for me to separate any positive feelings I have for this song from nostalgia because it is SO goddamn ridiculous (albeit catchy). Is this the first thing he put out with *no* piano on it?

animated gifs from this album's videos will never not be funny tho

"You may be right" is what drunk old guys with bandannas on their foreheads sing when they wander around parking lots

"You may be right" is what drunk old guys with bandannas on their foreheads sing when they wander around parking lots

― calstars, Thursday, September 21, 2017 9:20 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also, in my experience, in karaoke bars

christgau's billy joel page is maybe my favorite observable evolution of his opinions, right up to when he reaches the greatest hits record, writes "i give up" and gives it an a-

I was gonna say Bowie

Also: "Zanzibar" is very good.

such a jam, i love this without reservation

the drums on the chorus are my favorite thing

YOU MAY BE RIGHT (WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!)
I MAY BE CRAZY (WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!)

and Cannata's sax solo is great

my sister & i used to sing this all the time

i love the long/short phrasing/cadence of this:

thiniiiik of all the years
you tried to
find
some
one
to
sat
is
fy you
i might be as craaazy as you saaay
if i'm craaaazy then it's truuue
that it's allllll becauuuuse of youuuu
amd you wouldnt want me aaaany other waaaay

CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS: Trying to imagine sweet talkin' a girl who's ALONE IN HER ELECTRIC CHAIR.

Also, always liked this moment on his Live at Long Island tape. If only that light guy had been there in the USSR.

(Just typed in "Long in Live Island" while searching for that, and now I've got Captain Jack porn possibilities in my head.)

WMJ's album personas are seamless, by the way. (The only one slightly opaque is 52nd Street jazz boy.) Him releasing this album in the midst of New Wave wasn't some sort of "Hello, fellow students." He was still who he was AND he was still relevant. There isn't a false note anywhere on this album.

Well, except maybe when he sings in French, but we'll get to that.

Anyway, I think it's a great little rock single

Pretty sure he recorded it in NYC, but we'll take the compliment!

haaa

believe it or not, there IS piano buried in the mix, it's just really close to the rhythm guitar part and hard to catch. maybe most audible in the "told me not to drive" part. my guess is they decided they didn't want it, turned it down to zero, but still got just a taste of it on the other mics in the room.

thiniiiik of all the years
you tried to
find
some
one
to
sat
is
fy you

Joel's hyperenunciation on vocals, often borderline fussy, pays off here in the word "satisfy"

Agreed. He's a songwriter with high self-esteem; of course he wants his words un.der.stood.

(I can relate - when I have written a song with very careful attention to meter and to lyrical cleverness, I hate giving it to a singery singer who wants to do all sorts of murky singerish stuff with it that will render my perfect words unintelligible.)

Billy Joel on Glass Houses - "This album is hard rock heavy. No balance between the ballads and the harder stuff."

lol this album is heavy as a wad of bubblegum

that's pretty heavy in the particular gravity of billy joel's home planet

Good song, though I didn't like it much growing up. I like the verses more than the chorus (in fact, chorus is probably the worst part), for some of the phrasings he comes up with, like the thing vg posted

It was punk enough to be featured on a punk compilation....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipmunk_Punk

i am going to a karaoke party next saturday...i may sing this. or Only The Good Die Young

Wow. Is this the raciest song Alvin and company ever cut? I was expecting to find the lyrics bowdlerized but, nope, "I told you dirty jokes until you smiled." Also, say what you will about Billy's rhythm section but they certainly wipe the floor with the autopilot goons on this cut.

Good song, though I didn't like it much growing up. I like the verses more than the chorus (in fact, chorus is probably the worst part), for some of the phrasings he comes up with, like the thing vg posted

― Vinnie, Thursday, September 21, 2017

otm

Liberty DeVitto vs. Kenny Aronoff for king of the disgruntled hard hitting hacks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTWSXhMKX4I

Sometimes a Fantasy, Billy's sweaty ode to phone sex, keeps up the new-wavey trappings, hung on a vocal that owes more to Elvis or Buddy Holly. As the album's third single - unusually released in a version a good thirty seconds longer than that heard on the LP - it got to #36 in the US and #21 in Canada. Apparently this was a weak enough performance that it got left off of the Greatest Hits (though it outperformed "Goodnight Saigon").

Joel likes to talk about it getting some degree of public backlash due to its racy premise. Supposedly, some listeners also worked out the phone number at the start based on the dial tones and started harassing that particular Bell customer. O_o The video - a proper Music Video this time, with a plot, and still more Acting! - is obviously a must-see.

I should also mention, what with all the shredding on the fadeout, that as of this album Billy finally has a consistent lead guitarist, one Dave Brown, who'll stick around all the way through Storm Front. Some online sources have him showing up on The Stranger and 52nd Street but the liner notes aren't backing that up.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/SometimesAFantasy.jpg

hot damn i love that cover, it looks like a vintage contemporary paperback by a debut novelist with a quirky and compulsively readable yet deeply literary take on youth in new york

"This 'Fantasy' is the real deal." –Thomas McGuane

"LET'S SEE OL' MR. THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART PULL SOMETHING LIKE THIS OFF." - pplains, 3/18/2012

"Pull something off"

https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-13-2014/nUYiIH.gif

Supposedly, some listeners also worked out the phone number at the start based on the dial tones and started harassing that particular Bell customer.

Always had heard it was the phone number for the Root Beer Rag subscription line!

https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-13-2014/nUYiIH.gif

It's a small thing, but I like how the rhythm section holds back until the second bar of the verses.

I like how the Wiki for this song takes it as obvious that he is calling his long-term partner and not a 976 number. It also entirely avoids dealing with the bearded Alternate Future Timeline Billy, but I can't really blame them there.

Excellent drumming on this one. I don't care for the concluding guitar solo.

Glass Houses is one of those albums I remember seeing in older relatives collections and thinking the cover was so fascinating for some reason, the modern house I think was a big part of it, but I was fascinated by it before I ever heard it.

This period Billy is my jam...it's pretty amazing how he did such a canny job of "flipping the switch" into the 80s, 52nd Street is still so much a 70s album and his whole thing up to this point was piano driven singer-songwriter, perhaps the most "70s" thing you could be with the possible exception of a disco band...but yeah, it's like boom now we're all tense and nervy and new wave and it pretty much works great...I think the overworked huff n I'll puff n I'll blow yr house down thing that could have been a touch much in the 70s at times kind of lends itself to the new decade, he's got the same kinda frantic edge that dudes like Costello and Ian Dury and Graham Parker did.

Anyway, I kind of unreservedly love this stuff perhaps against all judgment.

yeah idk "she's so cold" has just never done anything at all for me. ditto "start me up" which basically displays all its tricks in the snippet used to promote windows 95 (where I first heard it), and they're mostly lifted from "thunder island" anyway. I like the sound of the recordings okay but they're just not what I look for from the stones.

also sorry I'm gonna just mansplain this shit even if c&ping Wiki is a dork move...but Start Me Up had been kicking around for a long time and there's no way Keith was ripping off Jay Fuckin Fergeson (though that may be a better song!) You could make a case for Keith ripping off himself with the riff a la John Fogerty but Thunder Island was a hit in 78 so the timing doesn't work even in the unlikely event the Stones knew or gave a fuck who Jay Ferguson even was

The basic track "Start Me Up" was recorded between the January and March 1978 sessions for the Rolling Stones' album Some Girls.[2] The song was at first cut as a reggae-rock track named 'Never Stop', but after dozens of takes the band stopped recording it and it was shelved. "Start Me Up" failed to make the cut for the album, being shelved into the vault. Of the song's history, Richards has commented:

"It was one of those things we cut a lot of times; one of those cuts that you can play forever and ever in the studio. Twenty minutes go by and you're still locked into those two chords... Sometimes you become conscious of the fact that, 'Oh, it's "Brown Sugar" again,' so you begin to explore other rhythmic possibilities. It's basically trial and error. As I said, that one was pretty locked into a reggae rhythm for quite a few weeks. We were cutting it for Emotional Rescue, but it was nowhere near coming through, and we put it aside and almost forgot about it."[3]

This and a side 2 deep cut are my favorite songs on this album - and you're right, his vocal on things like "I know that there's a number I can always dial for assistance" do hew really closely to Elvis Costello but in a really idiosyncratic way. Deployment on the synth on this track is excellent, as is the use of half-time in the instrumental break.

Although I'm pretty sure that synth portamento/tremelo at the end of the solo is exactly the same as the one going into the choruses of Manfred Mann's "Blinded By The Light" cover.

yeah it's cool to hear billy on a synth again after (I assume) ramone forced him at gunpoint to shelve that peppy lil' moog. what synth is this do we think? sounds a lot like the tone on "pressure.". i dunno if the manic guitar solo really fits the anxious energy of this song but i like the way it kinda emerges from that keyboard part.

and man well i'm def not gonna try to compete on stones trivia. tho that wikipedia entry would certainly be consistent with a scenario where they keep trying to make this thing work in a reggae style (i'm imagining "i can feel the fire" here) it never works, they shelve it, and when they return to it, it's a totally different tempo and arrangement, which happens to sound enormously similar to "thunder island," a top ten hit by a guy who i imagine had crossed the stones' path at some point in either his Spirit or Jo Jo Gunne tenures.

i dunno man... it's the same exact riff and he'd already charted with it years before theirs came out! but then these things happen. in one of the interview clips linked above, billy cops to discovering, years later, that "it's still rock n roll to me" has the same chord progression as "lay lady lay" which i admit would never have occurred to me in a million years.

Eephus OTM about that design! It's totally the look of Vintage Contemporary.

https://deepcovers.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/kosinski-steps.jpg?w=283&h=443

Dr. C.: "Pressure" doesn't sound like a DX7. Every studio had a Fairlight around this time, right?

The verses effectively mimic the tension of Cars/early-Attractions-era New Wave--a tension put to good use, given the song's subject matter--but the synth hook that follows the chorus is too broad (prog-y?) for me. It reminds me not so much of "Pressure" (though I see the resemblance) than of the stadium rock turn he'd take later in the decade.

I'm nominally an adult and I still don't truly know what that electric chair line is supposed to mean, but it's one of his best verses either way.

oooh I really like this

the intro has a real Cars feel, like I could sing "i dont mind you coming here...." over top & it kinda works

it really rocks though! i dig it

his rockabilly-style delivery is good; but maybe liven up with the backing vox on the chorus, those ooh oh oh's sound a bit unenthused

not huge into the twiddly synth but that's my own cross to bear

also thank u to ums for the side journey re Start Me Up/Jay Ferguson

Thunder Island is cool and all but i always thought that claim that the Stones ripped him off was a bit rich

this song is some cars shit

i also like it a lot

I don't remember this song at all, pretty forgettable. Interesting we're two songs in and there's minimal/nonexistent keyboards. A strange tacit admission that pianos don't "rock"...?

Apparently the synth line of "Pressure" is six synth parts layered, so it could be lots of things (though probably not Fairlight).